Four Minutes

This DVD comes with 4 interviews as special features, including one with writer/director Kris Krauss, actresses Monica Bleibtreu (Frau Krügler) and Hannah Herzsprung (Jenny von Loeben), and the film’s Producers: Alexandra and Meike Kordes.

Instead of being a traditional two-way dialogue, the interviews are broken down into a number of short monologues (usually between 30 seconds and a minute in length), each dealing with a slightly different issue, theme or question. At first this feels like an innovative attempt to maintain the audience’s interest and attention, enabling the interviewee to broach a wide variety of subjects without ever becoming sidetracked by any single question.

However, while these interviews do provide a handy introductory overview of the film, the arbitrary method of breaking them down into short ‘mini-monologues’ soon begins to feel intrusive and artificial. There’s no real sense of continuity between many of the segments and the overall impression is a lack of depth and a sense that many issues have simply been glossed over and not fully explored. It feels like a bullet-point summary of the interviews, rather than the genuine article.

It’s also a bit of a disappointment that the DVD offers no other extras, especially nothing in the way of deleted scenes. Given that this film focuses so heavily upon the psychology of the two main protagonists, it seems likely that any scenes which the director had chosen to omit from the film would have provided a really valuable insight into the intentions and thought-processes behind his portrayal of these two troubled individuals and their relationship.

For a film with so much intensity, passion, and depth it is a shame that the DVD itself has such a clinical feel and that it fails to scratch beneath the surface of this enthralling movie.